Tata group partners with Harvard University graduate students for the 12th annual 2015 India Conference at Harvard

Washington:The Tata group today announced that it will serve as the lead supporter of the “2015 India Conference at Harvard” at Harvard University on March 7 and March 8. This is the 12th annual conference and will welcome R Gopalakrishnan, director of Tata Sons, as a special keynote speaker on India’s path to global leadership, and S Padmanabhan, executive chairman, Tata Quality Management Systems, as a panelist.

The conference is organized jointly by the graduate students of Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School. Leaders in business, entertainment, government, and philanthropy will discuss India's aspirations and challenges and the way forward.

“As an India-based company, our commitment to global leadership has been foundational to our continued growth,” said James Shapiro, resident director, Tata Sons, North America. “This two-day event with Harvard University serves as a way to share our experience and passion, and brings together top leaders across disciplines with a shared goal.”

“Investors worldwide are looking at India with renewed interest,” said Cherian Kurien, conference co-chair and Harvard Business School 2015 MBA candidate. “This year’s conference will engage in a critical debate of what the various sectors of India’s economy must focus on, to ensure that the country uses this opportunity to make rapid progress in the coming months.”

Launched more than a decade ago, the two-day event allows executives across sectors and companies to provide thought leadership on the importance of India to the world’s growth and economy.

Green India Mission to Converge with NREGA to Grow Forest Cover

Yogima Sharma

New Delhi:





Both the schemes will facilitate afforestation on 10 million hectares of land over the next decade

The Centre has decided to extend its flagship rural jobs scheme to include afforestation as part of a move to create more durable assets through the programme that Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently derided as a living monument to the previous UPA government's failures and promised to overhaul it.Officials said the National Mission for a Green India (MIG) and the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) will now converge to facilitate afforestation on 10 million hectares of land over the next decade, along with providing forest-based livelihood income to three million households. Budget 2015-16 has made an initial allocation of `. 34,699 crore for MGNREGA, . 5,000 with a possibility of an increase of ` crore if buoyancy in tax collection allows, making it the highest allocation to the scheme since it was launched in 2006.
“Convergence of GIM with MGNREGS will help bring about better coordination in developing forests and their fringe areas, ensuring economic security to the backward sections in the rural sector,“ a senior government official told ET.
According to the official, the ministry of environment, forests and climate change and the rural development ministry have jointly agreed to converge the two schemes with a combined mission to increase the forest cover in the country by five million hectares while improving the quality of another five million hectares of forest land and increasing the forest-based livelihood income of about three million households.
“The progress of plantation under this convergence would be periodically monitored, using the remote sensing data, and photographic evidence shall be captured on a monthly basis,“ said the official, requesting not to be named.
The mission targets 10 million hectares of forestnon-forest land in 10 years, starting from 2015, and funds for the mis sion will be shared by the two central ministries.
All wages under MGNREGA will be met as a 100% central grant while the material component will be shared in 75:25 ratio between the Centre and state governments. Funds from GIM will flow in 90:10 ratio for the Northeast and special category states, and in 75:25 ratio for the rest of India.
All lands including village common lands, community lands, revenue wastelands, shifting cultivation areas, wetlands and private agricultural lands will be eligible for afforestation under convergence.
GIM is one of the eight missions under the National Action Plan on Climate Change envisaging a holistic view of greening and focuses on multiple ecosystem services, especially biodiversity, water, biomass, preserving mangroves, wetlands and critical habitats.
The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs had approved GIM as a centrally sponsored scheme in February 2014 with an aim to increase and improve the quality of forest cover and contribute to enhance ecosystem services along with reduction of carbon footprint as a co-benefit.
Employment scheme MGNREGA, introduced by the previous UPA regime, promises 100 days of work in a year to every rural household.

For Women's Sake, Democratise Society





Unless that link is established, Mar 8 has no meaning

March the 8th, International Women's Day, impacts corporate life a little less this year, for two reasons. One, it fell on a Sunday; and, two, in reality, Indians observe the day , for the most part, purely as a token, whose import is restricted to some women-oriented activities that day, with little spillover for the rest of the year. Women are seriously under-represented inside the womb, forget corporate boards, Parliament seats, the civil service, the judiciary or the professions. There is a good reason why the sincere efforts of many professional women (and some men) fail to make a difference to this hypocritical attitude towards women. Those who do try to make a difference in terms of gender sensitivity and gender equality rarely try to link this process with the overall democratisation of society, and so limit their own impact.Is such a link called for? Consider the discourse on women's safety . It centres on policing, legal penalties, panic buttons, etc. Very few voices seek to review society's attitudes towards women, about the serious breaches with religious teaching and tradition that women's equality calls for. The futility of pursuing social change in the limited space of elite interaction is brought home, more often than not, by violence. The elite have to interact with the non-elite. Emancipation clashes with the traditional notion that women who place themselves outside spatial and temporal locations that are considered virtuous are asking for sexual predation. A woman who climbs the corporate ladder alongside her male colleagues at the workplace can feel secure about her young daughter as she traverses home, city and campus, only when women's equality is part of society's consciousness at all levels.
Yet, she has a disincentive to see the question in broader democratic terms. Her own relative emancipation is achieved at the expense of subaltern women, to whom she outsources her domestic chores. Sharing of housework by men at all levels, in other words, is part of the process of rendering March 8 something a little more than a mere token.

Alcohol consumption peaks at 25: Study

London PTI





Frequent drinking becomes more common in middle to old age, peaking at 25 years, a new study in the United Kingdom has found.Teenagers favour bouts of irregular heavy drinking episodes, only drinking once or twice a week, but as we grow older we shift into a regular drinking pattern, researchers said. A substantial proportion of older men, drink daily or most days of the week, while a majority of women tend to drink monthly or on special occasions, they said.
“Understanding how drinking behaviour fluctuates throughout life is important to identify high risk groups and trends over time,“ lead author Annie Britton from the University College, Lon don (UCL) said.
This is the first attempt to harmonize data on drink ing behaviour from a wide range of population groups over their lifespan with repeated individual measures of consumption. The findings show how drinking behaviour changes over our lifetimes, from adolescence through to old age, and could be used to design public health initiatives and sensible drinking advice.
The researchers looked at both the average amount of alcohol consumed per week and the frequency of drinking. The findings were based on over 1,74,000 alcohol observations collected over a 34year period, spanning from 1979 to 2013, from participa nts born in different eras.
Drinking patterns change more for men than for women, but both follow a similar pattern, a rapid increase in alcohol intake during adolescence leading to a peak in early adulthood, followed by a plateau in mid-life, and then a decline into older ages.
For men, mean consumption of alcohol rose sharply during adolescence, peaked at around 25 years at 20 units (160g) per week, roughly the equivalent of drinking 10 pints of beer. Women followed a similar pattern, but reached a lower peak of around 7-8 units per week, around 4 pints of beer.

the speaking tree - Love Between Men And Women And Beyond

Mata Amritanandamayi





Love is an emotion common to all living beings. It is the path one human being can take to reach out to another, and for us to connect to Nature, and Nature to the universe. And the love that overflows all boundaries is `visva matrutvam', universal motherhood.The greatest flowering that can take place on this earth is that of love.A beautiful flower blossoms naturally , even from a small plant. Similarly , love sprouts in our hearts, blossoms and expands. We should permit this flowering from within. There is nothing more profound than the strength and beauty of two hearts that love each other.
Love has the cool freshness of the full moon and brilliance of the sun's rays. But love will not enter our hearts without permission. We should be equally willing to invite within, this love that is waiting. Today , a couple may even proclaim, just to delude others: “We are living together in mutual love and faith.“
This is make-believe love. Love is not something to be imagined or faked, but lived. It is life itself. To pretend is to wear a mask. No matter who dons it, it must be removed.
How did love, which is How did love, which is the intrinsic nature and obligation of a human being, become a mask? It happens in the absence of humility or spirit of compromise. If we just stand by a clear river and look, will our thirst be quenched? In order to quench our thirst, we must bend down and drink the water. All we have to do to fill ourselves with the crystalline waters of love is to surrender.
Men and women in rela tionships today have become like secret police. Whatever they see or hear makes them suspicious. Such doubt robs them of longevity and health. It is like a serious disease.People afflicted with this disease lose their capacity to listen empathetically to the problems of others. Even though many relationships are suffering, we have not lost love forever. If love dies, the universe will die. The eternal ember of love is in eternal ember of love is in everyone. We simply need to blow on it and it will be fanned into flames.
We are seeing more and more species becoming ex tinct. Are we going to allow love to become extinct as well? To prevent extinction of love, we must return to respecting, worshipping and having faith in a divine power. That power is not outside; it is inside, and to discover it, we need to adjust our perspective. For example, while reading a book, what we focus on are only the words, not the paper on which the words have been printed.The paper is the substratum on which the words have been made clear.
Try this experiment with a few people. Cover a fairly big board with white paper. Make a small black mark at the centre of the white paper. Then ask those present, “What do you see?“ Most people will probably say , “I see a small black dot.“ Very few will say , “I see a black mark at the centre of a large piece of white paper.“
Humanity today is like this. Men and women have lost the ability to appreciate that which is the very foundation of life ­ love. When we read, we must be able to see the letters. However, when reading, we must also understand that it is the paper that is the substratum. Similarly , my children must be able to understand that love is the foundation of life.Then all afflictions will vanish and everyone will know peace.
Follow Mata Amritanandamayi at speakingtree.in

Communal violence cases dropped by 22% from 2013 to 2014

Bharti Jain

New Delhi





Communal incidents in the country fell by almost 22% to 643 in 2014 from 823 in 2013. In fact, the latest figure is the lowest in the last three years, with 2012 having recorded 668 cases.A look at the data released by the government in reply to two Parliament questions dated December 2, 2014 and March 4, 2015 shows that Uttar Pradesh took much of the credit for the dip in communal attacks, recording the biggest drop (43.3%) from 247 incidents in 2013 to 140 last year. Incidentally , the high incidence of communal violence in UP in 2013 was mainly on account of the riots in Muzaffarnagar and adjoining areas in August and September that year.
The state-wise break-up of communal attacks reported in 2014 puts UP at the top of the table with 140 incidents, followed by Maharashtra with 93, Gujarat with 75, Karnataka with 74, Rajasthan with 70 and Bihar with 61. The incidence of communal flare-ups was higher in Maharashtra, Gujarat and Rajasthan in 2014 compared to 2013. While Maharashtra and Gujarat reported a marginal rise in incidents from 88 to 93 and 68 to 75 respectively , Rajasthan witnessed a significant increase in attacks from 52 in 2013 to 70 last year.
Tamil Nadu recorded just 14 incidents in 2014 compared to 36 in 2013, though Delhi recorded higher incidents at seven (an apparent outcome of the Trilokpuri riots last November) from just two in 2013.
As per a monthly break-up of communal incidents from October 2014 to January 2015, put out as an annexure to the government's reply to a Rajya Sabha query , 49 and 33 attacks were reported across the country in November and December 2014 respectively , though this went up to 72 incidents in January 2015.
The sharp rise in incidents in January was on account of higher cases reported in Maharashtra (21) and Bihar (12).

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